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A good Google ranking is essential for the success of a website. In the past years, we’ve witnessed continuous updates in the Google algorithm that brought several SEO changes. Three technical requirements for websites have emerged since the “Hummingbird” update you should take into consideration. These technical SEO basics are easy to realize and can boost your ranking. 1. Avoid Duplicate Content Here’s the good news: Google doesn’t penalize duplicate content anymore as long as it wasn’t created on purpose. However, deliberately created duplicate content is still penalized. According to the Google Webmaster Guidelines, Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results. – Google Webmaster Guidelines You don’t have to worry about unintentional duplicate content; it won’t carry a penalty. It can, however, affect your website in the Google’s search results. Therefore, try to avoid duplicate content. Internal and External Duplicate Content […]

During the keynote at the recent //BUILD 2015 conference, our team at Microsoft released Vorlon.js, a tool to debug your website. Vorlon.js is mainly composed of a dashboard which displays data coming from your site. To make it work, you only have to reference a script in your site code. We (Pierre Lagarde, David Catuhe, David Rousset and myself) built this primarily to help web developers debug their websites on mobile devices. Of course, proprietary solutions already exist like Chrome developer tools to debug chrome mobile, or the equivalent for Safari and Visual Studio for Internet Explorer or even Weinre; but none of these is really technology and platform-agnostic. This is the gap we wanted to fill with Vorlon.js. You can install Vorlon.js either from npm or by cloning the GitHub repository and using gulp to make it ready to use. You can find more information about that on our website (http://vorlonjs.io/) or on the blog article my friend David wrote. To create a plugin for Vorlon, you can use TypeScript or directly with JavaScript. I will give you the JavaScript and TypeScript code so you can read it in your favorite language 🙂 What We Are Going to Create In […]

The waiting is over. Smashing Book #5 is here, it’s smashing, and it’s shipping worldwide — in fact, all pre-orders have just been dispatched. Think of it as a reliable playbook to master all the tricky hurdles of responsive design, well-tested in real-life projects by respected designers and developers. Ah, sure, you can get the book right away.

Now, a standalone release post would be boring and predictable, so how about bringing another perspective to the magazine instead? Below you’ll find some insights about the writing process by one of the authors of the book, Sara Soueidan, who has contributed an 80-page long compendium of useful techniques, tricks and strategies for dealing with SVG. — Ed.

The post Finally: Smashing Book #5 Is Here, And It’s Hot Like Smoking Barrels. appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Banner ads have been around for quite a while. In fact, in internet terms, they have been with us forever, the first ones starting to appear in the mid-90s. Advertising banners are specific areas on a website where ads are placed, just like print ads in a magazine. Clicking on a banner usually takes you to the website of the advertiser. With this post, we will introduce you to this long-serving online marketing tool and discuss how to bring it up to speed with today’s marketing needs. Advertising banners have seen their share of criticism for quite some time. Some say many users just ignore all advertising – a phenomenon called banner blindness. Others fear the increasing use of ad blockers would render banner ads obsolete. Both scenarios would lead to click rates hovering around zero. But in spite of all this, banners are still one of the most popular tools of online advertising. One reason being that there are ways to, at least partly, work around banner blindness and ad blockers to achieve better results. After all, internet giants like Google, Amazon etc. also still use banner advertising, and they are getting results. Net advertising expenditures for online banners […]

As UX professionals, we know the value of conducting usability research. But UX research initiatives — even when designed well — are not perfect. A lab study to test a website, for example, would never perfectly capture a user’s actual behavior in the wild. This is because, inevitably, the research protocol itself will influence the findings.

A lab environment can never replicate the natural environment of the participant, and the mere presence of a research facilitator or moderator creates a dimension of artificiality that can thwart the research goals. They must not only facilitate sessions in such a way that the research goals are achieved, but also balance two challenges that are constantly at odds with each other: keeping the participant within the scope of the study, while allowing the participant to be in the driver’s seat in order to make the experience as realistic as possible.

The post How To Moderate Effectively In Usability Research appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

In the first part of the case study about Mail.Ru Group product design unification, I described our first approach — a mobile web framework. Aside from creating a unified visual style and interaction principles for a dozen services, we’ve also transformed our design process from the classic “prototype ? design mock-up ? HTML ? implementation” approach for every screen, to a modern and more efficient framework-based approach.

In this second part I’ll show how we have improved the same technology to embody larger versions of these products and made our “Bootstrap on steroids” more powerful. In the spring of 2012, our business unit acquired 11 content-based projects: Auto, Events Guide, Health, Horoscopes, Kids, Lady, Moto, News, Sports, TV, and Weather. Many of them are very successful in their market niche in Russia; however, they each have their own history, often with outsourced designs that led to inconsistencies.

The post Product Design Unification Case Study, Part 2: “Burger-Driven” Framework appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

We know that the customer is always right. However, this motto is often neglected costing website operators a lot of money that could have been better spent. No matter what industry your company is in, the customer should come first in each marketing strategy. You can optimize your sales only with satisfied clients. But customer satisfaction is very fragile, especially in the digital world; your competitors are only one click away. This requires a stronger focus not only, but especially on customer satisfaction and service. The same applies to online shops and any other web-based businesses. Not only products, processes, etc. have to be optimized, but also the user experience design. We’ll tell you what is meant by that and how to do it… What is User Experience Design? The concept of user experience design focuses on the interaction between the website and the customer ensuring a fast and pleasant process. The success of a website largely depends on user experience (UX) design, which is not surprising really. Only if customers have a good experience with a website, they’ll develop the confidence to take the next step. The User Experience ISO 9241-210 The term user experience is defined in ISO […]

The first version of Flight Simulator shipped in 1980 for the Apple II and, amazingly, it was in 3D! That was a remarkable achievement. It’s even more amazing when you consider that all of the 3D was done by hand, the result of meticulous calculations and low-level pixel commands. When Bruce Atwick tackled the early versions of Flight Simulator, not only were there no 3D frameworks, but there were no frameworks at all! Those versions of the game were mostly written in assembly, just a single step away from ones and zeroes that flow through a CPU. When we set out to reimagine Flight Simulator (or Flight Arcade as we call it) for the web and to demonstrate what’s possible in the new Microsoft Edge browser and EdgeHTML rendering engine, we couldn’t help but think about the contrast of creating 3D then and now – old Flight Sim, new Flight Sim, old Internet Explorer, new Microsoft Edge. Modern coding seems almost luxurious as we sculpt 3D worlds in WebGL with great frameworks like Babylon.js. It lets us focus on very high level problems. In this article, we’ll share our approach to one of these fun challenges: a simple way to […]

The babylon.JS team at Microsoft recently released a new update (v2.1) with a host of new and improved tools to build browser-based 3D experiences, like Assassin’s Creed Pirates and Flight Arcade. In this article, I’ll walk you through some of the major updates, along with links to demos and sandbox builds you can try yourself. First, a quick ‘thank you’ to the community. Over the past few months, we’ve had more community-oriented support than ever. Thanks to all these wonderful people we were able to release a LOT of new features and improvements! So let’s get started! You can find all the code here: https://github.com/BabylonJS/Babylon.js/releases/tag/v2.1 Unity 5 Exporter Unity is an awesome tool to create games that can work on almost all operating systems out there. I love the Unity 5 WebGL exporter—it’s a great way to export all your games to a WebGL/ASM.JS/WebAudio website. To complete this solution, if you want to export meshes to a lighter projection that could run without ASM.JS, you can now install the Babylon.js exporter: https://github.com/BabylonJS/Babylon.js/tree/master/Exporters/Unity%205 When installed, the exporter allows you to export a scene by going to the Babylon.js exporter menu: After a few seconds, a .babylon file is generated alongside associated […]

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It is the ability to identify patterns of insights and “connect the dots” in a meaningful way.

Bruce Nussbaum, in a blog post: 3 Paths Toward A More Creative Life, calls it “Pattern Sight”.

Pattern sight requires you to master the skill of looking for what should and shouldn’t be there. It’s the ability not only to see the rare “odd duck” but to routinely look for that duck and see it…It takes time to learn patterns of information, which is why you need to spend a lot of time “in the field.”

We call that “experience,” and you’ve seen that whenever you’re in a situation with someone who just “knows” what’s coming next without being able to explain it. That person is reading the patterns. This mastery is not about fresh eyes but wise eyes.

Many people use Design Thinking as a methodology for problem solving, innovation, or just figuring out what to do next. The key ingredient to arriving to the best solutions comes from identifying these patterns.

This is also the key reason why you cannot completely learn Design Thinking through, for example, a 3 day program or even one that is a week or more. We know, because we have been teaching it for years.

Most DT training programs will perhaps, at best, give you an introduction to Design Thinking and its value. However getting it done right requires experience, experience that stems from years of deliberate practice in identifying such patterns and applying it positively.

I like to expand this skill to also include the (overlapping) ability to reframe problems and situations. Many people look at reframing as simply turning negative to positive, or going from “left” to “right”. It’s a lot more.

This quote sums it up nicely and also my blog post today. Have a great week ahead!

Thus the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.

-Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860

The post The Most Important Skill All Design Thinkers Must Have appeared first on Design Sojourn.